This (double-)album deserves its own thread.
It will move moutains in the history of metal with symphonic orchestrations, or more aptly put symphonically orchestrated metal. Though I have little hope it will reach to a much wider audience than their two previous efforts FluXion and Aeolian, as most people will recoil before the insane intricacy of the mix (some songs required up to 80 tracks...). As I have no words yet beyond catatonic bewilderment, I will just provide some technical details, and will post more thoughts later on.
So the artwork to begin with:
Then a brief discourse from the band on the album's monolithic concept:
THE OCEAN's 'Precambrian' is composed of a mini-CD with 22 minutes playing time entitled »Hadean/Archaean«, and a full-length CD with 62 minutes playing time, entitled »Proterozoic«, both referring to successive geological eons within the Precambrian. The songs are divided into 5 subordinate eras, with the song-titles carrying the names of subordinate geological periods.
Apparently, the concept and album artwork of Precambrian evolve around the early days of this planet, when mother earth was a hostile and uninhabitable place reigned by fire, sulfur and streams of red-glowing lava... the earth's heat flow was nearly three times higher than it is today. Liquid water oceans existed despite the surface temperature of 230°C because of the atmospheric pressure of the heavy CO2 atmosphere. While Hadean and Archaean saw the beginning of the formation of the atmosphere, interrupted by events such as the oxygen catastrophe, the earth started to cool down and first simple forms of life sprang up during the Proterozoic.
Logically, THE OCEAN's 'Hadean / Archaean' is brutal, invidious, complex in its arrangements yet simplistic in its instrumentation, and raw and unpolished in sound, continuing where 'Aeolian' left off.
'Proterozoic' is the more tempered of the 2 albums; still erupting frequently and heavily, but at times yielding way to moments of beauty and sublimity in between. Elaborate in its musical ideas and multi-layered due to its massive instrumentation, dramatic in its arrangements and expansive in sound, 'Proterozoic' is an ambitious album of truly epic proportions.
Lyrically, the album was largely influenced by Brazilian-French Proto-Surrealist Lautréamont and his visionary novel 'Chants of Maldoror'. Quotes from the 'Chants' are interspersed throughout the booklets of the 2x-album, and songs like 'Mesoarchaean / Legions of Winged Octopi' and 'Neoarchaean / To Burn the Duck of Doubt', among others, employ lengthy passages from the 'Chants'.
In fine, their website and fagspace for deeper insight and musical deflowering...
It will move moutains in the history of metal with symphonic orchestrations, or more aptly put symphonically orchestrated metal. Though I have little hope it will reach to a much wider audience than their two previous efforts FluXion and Aeolian, as most people will recoil before the insane intricacy of the mix (some songs required up to 80 tracks...). As I have no words yet beyond catatonic bewilderment, I will just provide some technical details, and will post more thoughts later on.
So the artwork to begin with:
Then a brief discourse from the band on the album's monolithic concept:
THE OCEAN's 'Precambrian' is composed of a mini-CD with 22 minutes playing time entitled »Hadean/Archaean«, and a full-length CD with 62 minutes playing time, entitled »Proterozoic«, both referring to successive geological eons within the Precambrian. The songs are divided into 5 subordinate eras, with the song-titles carrying the names of subordinate geological periods.
Apparently, the concept and album artwork of Precambrian evolve around the early days of this planet, when mother earth was a hostile and uninhabitable place reigned by fire, sulfur and streams of red-glowing lava... the earth's heat flow was nearly three times higher than it is today. Liquid water oceans existed despite the surface temperature of 230°C because of the atmospheric pressure of the heavy CO2 atmosphere. While Hadean and Archaean saw the beginning of the formation of the atmosphere, interrupted by events such as the oxygen catastrophe, the earth started to cool down and first simple forms of life sprang up during the Proterozoic.
Logically, THE OCEAN's 'Hadean / Archaean' is brutal, invidious, complex in its arrangements yet simplistic in its instrumentation, and raw and unpolished in sound, continuing where 'Aeolian' left off.
'Proterozoic' is the more tempered of the 2 albums; still erupting frequently and heavily, but at times yielding way to moments of beauty and sublimity in between. Elaborate in its musical ideas and multi-layered due to its massive instrumentation, dramatic in its arrangements and expansive in sound, 'Proterozoic' is an ambitious album of truly epic proportions.
Lyrically, the album was largely influenced by Brazilian-French Proto-Surrealist Lautréamont and his visionary novel 'Chants of Maldoror'. Quotes from the 'Chants' are interspersed throughout the booklets of the 2x-album, and songs like 'Mesoarchaean / Legions of Winged Octopi' and 'Neoarchaean / To Burn the Duck of Doubt', among others, employ lengthy passages from the 'Chants'.
In fine, their website and fagspace for deeper insight and musical deflowering...
